FAREWELL to FALL

First, the last of these five recordings of the fall of fall looks up into some of the trees that border the Meridian Playfield in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. The park was once an orchard for the Roman Catholic Good Shepherd Home for Girls, and a favored few of the old fruit trees survive. The panorama merges four images photographed on Saturday the 6th of December, 2008, around 3:30 in the afternoon The center of the scene is to the northwest. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

One month and four days earlier (Nov. 2, 2008) I recorded the several parts for this about 260 degree panorama that includes part of the P-Patch (far left) and most of the Tilth garden. At the center this pan looks northeast from a Tilth prospect that is near the southern border of the Good Shepherd Campus. The home seen in part on the right is off-campus and faces Corliss Avenue at its campus dead end north of 46th Street. The pan is a stitching of eight photos.

The trees that break the horizon above Tilth’s A-Frame greenhouse, left-of-center in the above panorama, appear again in the next recording which looks east towards the Good Shepherd Center and on the same second day of November, 2008. My back is to the Meridian playfield. The popular Pergola on the left supports and shelters several concerts during the warmer months, and below the tapping feet of the musicians several families of Rabbits have used the pergola as a hutch. It is thought that these opportunists made their way to the campus from Woodland Park.

Wet leaves and the bouquets they make can be found throughout the campus resting in and beside the bushes. This arrangement, however, was discovered a block off campus near the intersection of 46th and Corliss on November 11, 2008.

The last signs of fall included here are the reflections of an autumnal sunset off the west facades of the glass-curtain University District Building at the southeast corner of 11th Avenue and 45th Street – for many years the District’s unofficial mayor, Cal McCune, had his office there – and behind and above it the old corporate Safeco Building recently purchased by the University of Washington. It is the school’s first true high-rise and a symbol of sorts for many developments in the culture of higher education including grade inflation in the school’s undergraduate classes. B’s continue to rise to A’s at a pace more relentless than global warming. They are compassionately engineered by human forces in the interests of both comforting and complimenting the often anxious students and also avoiding their sometimes impetuous wrath. The school recently replaced the insurance company’s banner sign with its own across the top of their new skyscraper. The photograph was snapped while leaving Trader Joe’s with some pre-cooked brown rice and 73% dark chocolate in the purple wrapper on Dec. 6, 2008.